More than 15 years ago, Toby Keith sang that he got a little too high with Willie Nelson, and he promised he’d “never smoke weed with Willie again.”
Now Nelson says he’s done smoking marijuana himself.
“I have abused my lungs quite a bit in the past, so breathing is a little more difficult these days and I have to be careful,” the 86-year-old musician told KSAT-TV in San Antonio last week. “I don’t smoke anymore — take better care of myself.”
He’s not giving up on cannabis, though, just smoking. He may be moving on to the vaping crowd, or perhaps he’s baking cannabis into his cookies. Edibles can’t hurt your lungs, though they can hit harder than you’d expect. As for vaping THC, he should be wary: Sketchy black market pods containing the chemical appear to be responsible for the majority of vaping deaths and illnesses in the news.
Smoking or otherwise, marijuana use is rising among young people, and Michigan just became the latest state to legalize the drug for recreational use. For adults over the age of 21, marijuana is now legal in 11 states, and 33 states permit it for medicinal use.
As marijuana is slowly legalized throughout the country, medical professionals are still studying its effects, much like tobacco a few decades ago. While the discussion surrounding legalization usually focuses on the product itself, fewer conversations focus on how different forms of consumption can change its effects.
As for Nelson, he says marijuana has been a replacement for cigarettes and whiskey.
He told Rolling Stone this spring, “I wouldn’t have lived 85 years if I’d have kept drinking and smoking like I was when I was 30, 40 years old. I think that weed kept me from wanting to kill people. And probably kept a lot of people from wanting to kill me, too, out there drunk, running around.”
